Remote control devices are widely employed to control a wide variety of remotely controllable devices and appliances such as televisions, video players, home theater systems, lighting devices, doors, washing machines, air conditioners, and so forth. With the advancement of technology, various types of remote control devices are available based on a input method (e.g., remote control device using physical keys, voice commands, gesture detection, sensor movements, touch screen, etc.), or based on a communication technology employed (e.g., infrared, Bluetooth, telecommunication signal, other wireless technology, etc.).
Though existing remote control devices provide various ways for interacting with the devices, the interaction techniques are usually not convenient and non-intuitive. For example, it is not uncommon to see each household having different remote control devices for different devices and appliances. Each of the remote control devices has its own pre-defined set of hard buttons to be remembered. Further, even universal remote control devices come with pre-defined set of hard buttons. A user needs to identify and press buttons of the remote control devices accordingly for his intended manipulation of the target device.
Remote control devices having interactive touch screen displays addresses above limitations but they are usually costly and consume more power than regular remote control devices. Remotely controlling devices and appliances with gesture is another alternative, but they usually require the remotely controllable devices and appliances to be equipped with gesture detection and recognition techniques. This may mean duplication of remote control system for different devices. Further, even in cases where there is a universal gesture based remote control, it requires the user to remember many gestures to interact with the remotely controllable devices. For example, there may be different gestures to select the volume control and channel control of a television, whereas in a physical world the user would just press a different button in both cases.
In summary, existing remote control devices have the following limitations: non-intuitive way to select a target device to control, non-intuitive way to control the target device, increase in power consumption and cost of the remote control device employing touch sensitive displays.